DevTrend: Moving Marketing In House?

November 15, 2016

In the past year we have worked with a number of national brands who are choosing to no longer work with an outside marketing agency. I do not know if this is a trend or not — however with the explosion in automation technology and scaled marketing solutions it’s easy to see why some would. Here are some of the common threads we are seeing from product/ marketing managers at national — mid sized brands:

Infrequency: “We want to provide engaging experiences and our agency starts a social campaign then stops — we want to own it/ keep the conversation going permanently,” said marketing manager at a mid sized national brand.

The model for agencies has typically been to run funded social campaigns till the campaign is over then the agency re-pitches for the next campaign.

The marketing managers we are talking to feel like they can produce results for the short and long term with the budgets being handed over to the agencies.

Owning the relationship: landing pages created by some agencies are owned by the agency — any leads driven through the landing page is logged via agency. “It is our customer we want to own the conversation not have it sent through an agency and back to us,” says VP of Interactive.

Brands want to control the relationship through information.

Asymmetric information: with more tools flooding agencies from analytics to automated bidding those same tools are available to marketing and product managers. Before “reporting calls,” were necessary for the agency to report on success metrics and traffic — but now martech technologies can pinpoint whether the marketing spend actually resulted in ROI. The ask of successful marketing managers is no longer impression based but who, why, how, what etc did these customers engage with our brand.

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I can remember the first time I talked with a marketing manager at a national brand this year — they just fired their agency and they were in our office a few hours after. They said, “I don’t need an agency to do my job, but I know what my limitations are.” Since then the marketing manager (from the outside) seems to be executing on their plan. They chose DevHub to take their national brand → regional → hyper local w/ highly customized and unique content spread across thousands of landing ‘portal’ pages in a flexible approach to scaled presence campaigns — one hub for their foundational digital experience ;)